Falkenberg

Before I continue with another Allsvenskan 2016 update – the last before the season ends – I have some news regarding the blog.

As some of you may know, I’ve been working part time for StrataBet this season, mostly writing game previews for the Norwegian Tippeligaen. As I soon take on a new, full-time job elsewhere I likely won’t have the time to write as much as I want. Also, with my new job focusing on Allsvenskan and Swedish football in general, I may be reluctant to give away too much information to the general public, so the future of this blog is very uncertain.

I’m hoping to continue writing in some form though, and what I do write will likely be closely linked to StrataBet as they’ve given me access to their great dataset.

Allsvenskan 2016 – The Endgame

Ok, so let’s get on with another update. With only 3 rounds left – the next starts tonight – we can see how much of the drama has gone out of the league table since last time. Malmö have retaken the top spot and thanks to Norrköping’s recent poor form the gap down to the title contenders is now 4 points. Sure, both Norrköping and AIK can still theoretically win the title, but I would be very surprised if Malmö let this slip out of their hands, despite the disappointing defeat to Östersund. They do have some disturbing injury problems though…

Göteborg have a chance to break into the top-3 and gain a European spot for next season, but this looks even more unlikely with 7 points up to AIK. At the other end of the table the bottom-3 have looked locked in for a long time. Helsingborg still have a chance to overtake Sundsvall, but again I’d be very surprised if this happens. In mid-table we see how Elfsborg, Kalmar and Hammarby have climbed a few spots at the expense of Örebro, Häcken and Östersund.

Counting up shots we see how Djurgården surprisingly is the best defensive side when it comes to denying the opposition chances to shoot. We also see how Gefle continue to be very bad and that Örebro still is the main outlier with A LOT of shots both taken and conceded.

Looking at effectiveness up front we see few changes since last time. Elfsborg have been slightly more effective with their shooting though, partly explaining their climb in the table. On the other end of the scale, Helsingborg have had a real problem scoring on their chances lately, with ZERO goals since the last update.

Looking at defensive effectiveness we see why Djurgården’s ability to deny the opposition chances hasn’t seen them climb into the upper half of the table: They still concede a lot of goals on the chances they do allow. Only bottom-of-the-table Falkenberg are worse. With Malmö and Norrköping’s effectiveness declining since last time, AIK now stands out as the far superior defensive side.

Not much have changed in terms of chance quality either – but what is interesting here is that Djurgården is the best defensive side when it come to xG as well. So if they concede very few chances, and very little xG – why are they conceding all those goals? My guess is – I don’t have time to look it up – that the few chances they do concede are of higher quality. Djurgården have also had a lot of problems with goalkeepers this season. Having used 4 keepers so far, only star signing Andreas Isaksson has looked stable enough but he has picked up an injury and will be out for the remainder of the season.

I don’t know much about evaluating goalkeepers but have been thinking about doing a blog post about it for some time now, hopefully I’ll get to it in the near future.

Looking at Expected Goals Difference, we see how Djurgården’s lack of defensive effectiveness has robbed them of a nice upper half finish. My model currently ranks them as 5th in the league, close to Hammarby in 4th – far above their current 11th place.

We also see how AIK have overtaken Norrköping in 2nd place, and with the reigning champions in poor form and just 3 points above AIK, this is where most of the drama left in the season lies. At the bottom of the table, Helsingborg are actually ranked far better than Sundsvall above them, but the 7 point gap will likely be too much for Henrik Larsson’s men with only 3 games remaining.

The model has always liked Malmö and they actually have the chance to secure the title tonight, if Norrköping lose away to Elfsborg while Malmö win away to Falkenberg – a not too unlikely outcome. In the race for 2nd place, AIK now have the upper hand much thanks to Norrköping’s recent poor results. Göteborg seems to have all but locked in the 4th place and the same goes for the bottom 3.

To continue my slight focus on Djurgården in this post, they’re interestingly projected to take about 6 points from their 3 remaining games: Helsingborg away, Häcken at home and Sundsvall away. Given their very disappointing season, and as a cynical Djurgården supporter, I doubt this.

With the regular Swedish season being over and Norrköping crowned champions, all that’s left now is to decide who’ll get the last spot in next years Allsvenskan. In this qualification play-off, Sirius finishing 3rd in Superettan is pitted against Allsvenskan’s 14th placed Falkenberg in a two-game battle.

Let’s have a look at some stats for the teams, compared to both the teams in Allsvenskan (blue) and Superettan (red):

From this graph, Sirius actually look really good with especially a strong defensive, even when compared to the Allsvenskan teams, while Falkenberg’s defence looks really poor. However, this doesn’t say much about how the teams compare to each other since Falkenberg has had to face far tougher opponents in Allsvenskan.

Looking at the xG maps what again stands out is the defensive performances of the teams. While Falkenberg have conceded a massive 415 shots, almost 14 per game, Sirius have only conceded 241 shots or about 8 per game. Not only that, Sirius’ xG per conceded attempt is 0.111 while Falkenberg’s is a staggering 0.154, meaning they concede shots in quite bad (for them) situations – not a good thing.Looking at individual players we can se how Sirius’ Stefan Silva is the big overperformer here with his 12 goals almost doubling his xG numbers. Also, Falkenberg seem to have more goalscoring options with three players over 6 goals while Sirius only have Silva.

As always, I’m not willing to present any prediction for individual games, but here I had hoped to show the results of a simulation covering both play-off games including possible extra time and penalty shoot-out. I have run such an simulation, however I’m not happy with the results as my model seems to be favouring Sirius too heavily. This is almost certainly due to the different leagues involved, making Sirius look way better than they would be against an Allsvenskan side. Since I only came up with writing this post this morning, I haven’t had the time to look into a possible league strength variable to use in the simulation.

But if I had to guess, I’d say that Sirius looks like a real strong side and should possibly be considered favourites for promototion here, mostly due to Falkenberg’s nasty habit of conceding a lot of shots with high goal expectancies.